Without any art education Delaunay started circa 1903, painting at first in a neo-impressionistic style, till he discovered Cubism art and became an active artist in the Cubist group in Paris with Picasso, Braque, Gris and Leger. The limitations in color use by the cubist artists couldn’t satisfy his longing for a fresh and colorful art, which lead him to his personal style, Orphic cubism or better Orphism. Fresh colors, movement, light, dynamic and rhythm became essential to Delaunay; the core elements of his simultaneous approach.
In 1910 Delaunay married the female artist Sonja Terk, and they settled in a studio in Paris. Circa 1911 he was invited by Kandinsky to participate in an exhibition of the Blue Rider (Blaue Reiter) in Munich. Macke, Franz Marc and Paul Klee became strongly inspired by the color use and art concepts of Delaunay.

Robert Delaunay was interested in the geometric fragmentation of cubism, but—unlike the cubist painters, who removed almost all colour from their paintings—he considered colour to be a powerful aesthetic element. One of the ideas Delaunay used in the question how to integrate colour and Cubism was ’the principles of harmony and contrast of colours and their applications to the arts’, generated by the chemist Michel-Eugene Chevreul. Delaunay was interested in applying these concepts in an abstract way, exploring the effects of colour and light when they are not bound to an object. In his painting Simultaneous Composition: Sun Disks (1912–13), for example, he painted superimposed circles of colour that have a sense of rhythm and movement that can be considered analogous to music harmony. his wife, Sonia Delaunay, also experimented with an orphic painting style.

Apollinaire regarded the colourful cubist-inspired paintings of Robert Delaunay as initiating a new modern art-style that brought musical qualities to the area of painting. So he named this style Orphism in reference to Orpheus, the legendary poet and singer of ancient Greek mythology.